ABSTRACT

I write as an ethnographer of childhoods and literacies toshare a critical methodological lesson I have learned: simply observing children in educational settings will not yield rich understandings of the inequities arising from the interplay of societal constructs of race, class, and gender. Such understandings require ethnographic digs, analogous to those of geologists and archeologists. Surface level educational happenings must be situated in institutional, geographic, and ideological landscapes, both historical and sociopolitical. These foundational layers echo in both formal and informal school practices, including those of peers . To illustrate, I draw on data from a 4-year case study of Ta’Von, a Black child in a white-majority elementary school; I focus on his experiences in ‘the achievement gap.’ Those experiences, reverberating with local racialized history, suggest that inclusive schools require, not fixing children to eliminate a gap, but fixing the taken-for-granted assumptions and practices of schools.

摘要

我以童年和文学的民族志学家的身份写这篇文章，以分享我学到的一个重要的方法论教训：仅仅观察教育环境中的儿童不会对种族、阶级和性别等社会结构相互作用所产生的不平等产生丰富的理解。这种理解需要人种学挖掘，类似于地质学家和考古学家的挖掘。表面层面的教育事件必须位于历史和社会政治的制度、地理和意识形态景观中。这些基础层在正式和非正式的学校实践中都有呼应，包括同龄人的实践。为了说明这一点，我借鉴了 Ta'Von 的 4 年案例研究数据，Ta'Von 是一所以白人为主的小学的黑人孩子；我专注于他在“成就差距”方面的经历。那些经历，